A lot of my photography needs to be as sharp and realistic as possible; dolphin photo-ID and kittiwake colony counts both require technical precision, and accurate depiction of the subject, and they’ve filled a lot of memory card space over the last few years.
For a long time, most of my landscape photography was similarly precise. Mainly black and white, although I love the colours of sunset and sunrise, often contrasty, but usually identifiable to location and with an obvious subject.
That started to change 7 years ago. I was leading a photography holiday on the Northumberland coast and all of the guests had said they wanted to be out very early the next morning to photograph the sunrise. Surprisingly, or not, I was the only one who actually headed to the beach at 5am so it was just me, my camera, an occasional dog-walker, and sublime light just before sunrise. I was hand-holding, with exposures of up to 5s, so knew that there would be some camera movement. I’ve always had an obsession with capturing the movement of water, but the ethereal painterly feel of images taken with several seconds of exposure and without the safety net of a tripod anchoring familiar shapes in the frame was something I’d never attempted.
In future posts I’ll share the development of my own landscape photography over the last few years, as well as techniques, and thoughts about veering away from realism…
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